With the great amount of information available on the Internet, and the increasing competition for visitor attention, serving effective web pages is critically important in many industries, such as online lead generation, brand promotion, and online advertising, where the Internet is used to direct visitors to web sites of vendors or advertisers. Such activities depend heavily on targeting meaningful ads or content to visitors in the expectation of engendering specific visitor interaction with specific web sites. Through hypertext linking and supplemental content serving mechanisms, online advertising systems allow ad messages to be delivered through focused delivery channels that target specific audiences and that are tailored to these different audiences. Visitor interaction with a targeted message, such as an online ad or text message typically results in the direction or redirection of a visitor to a web page (landing page) served by an advertiser or vendor. For example, when a visitor clicks on an advertisement that is displayed on a target web page or clicks on a text link produced as the result of a search engine query, the visitor is directed to a landing page, also referred to as a lead capture page. The landing page displays content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. This type of lead generation system is one example of an application in which optimized web pages are served to a visitor, and many other applications are possible.
Typical landing pages either present information that is relevant to the visitor, such as text/image content, links, or similar elements, or they provide the visitor with an opportunity to complete a transaction, such as by clicking on a link to make a purchase, filling out a form, redeeming a coupon, or performing some other action with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. The event of a visitor taking a desired action on a landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or the quality of the web page can be measured by its conversion rate, which is the percentage of visitors who completed the desired action. The efficiency and effectiveness of an online marketing program is thus determined by the conversion rate of the web pages used in the program. Web pages are thus constantly evaluated and possibly replaced or modified during the course of an ad campaign.
This test and modification process hopefully yields a web page or pages that are optimized for the campaign. In this context, the term “optimized” refers to the result of a process of designing web pages based on an estimated efficiency with respect to a particular objective. Web pages can be optimized along many different dimensions, depending upon their purpose and the context in which they are accessed. Web pages are typically optimized with respect to their creative content and appearance, so that a visitor will be persuaded to purchase a product or service through the web page based on the content and look and feel of the page. It is generally very difficult to optimize web pages for all topics or products that a website may provide and for all visitors to the website. In some cases (e.g., for a specific audience) a particular page may be more efficient than another page, and in other cases it may be less efficient. In order to maximize efficiency and to prevent burnout caused by overexposure of efficient web pages, page sponsors will generate multiple web pages, each differing in some respect from the others, and then rotate them in and out of service. Various different testing schemes can be employed to test the effectiveness of different web pages, such as A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT). Dramatic differences in visitor interaction can be often be seen through testing different copy text, form layouts, images, background colors and other features on a landing page.
In the online advertising context, testing involves comparing two or more content variations of one or more components of a website in a live environment. The test procedure typically performs numerous split tests or A/B tests on a web page at the same time to determine the best of two or more web pages, or conducts multivariate testing to determine the best combination of content variations across multiple web page components. In multivariate testing, the practical limit on the number of combinations and the number of variables in a test are the amount of time it will take to get a statistically valid sample of visitors, given the rate of visitors to the site per unit time and the average conversion rate across the tested alternatives. In general, multivariate testing is carried out on a dynamically generated website by setting up the server to display the different variations of content in equal proportions to incoming visitors. Visitor behavior after exposure to the different variations is measured, analyzed and presented as statistical data. The web page can then be modified in response to the statistical data and a new or modified web page can be redeployed and then tested. Multivariate testing is thus a relatively static testing scheme that is not particularly flexible or conducive to real-time authoring or modification of web pages.
One significant disadvantage associated with present web page testing methods is that they assume that there is only one optimal web page or that some features or characteristics are inherently better or more important than other features. That is, the multivariate testing protocols are set up under the assumption that only one web page will be the best (i.e., most efficient) page for all conditions. In reality, however, the model of a single “best” web page is severely limiting because different web pages may be better than others depending upon a number of significant factors, such as where and how the visitor accessed the page (visitor context), the purpose of the web page, and many other possible factors. Furthermore, the test-modification-retest cycle of present testing methods to find a single optimum web page often results in a test and deployment cycle that is too long in the context of ad campaigns that typically require fast deployment of web pages.
What is needed, therefore, is a web page optimization system that (1) analyzes contextual factors related to web page interaction; (2) allows for real-time authoring of a web page under test; and (3) continuously measures feedback based on any modification to the web page.